Senior Developer Advocate
Element, United Kingdom
Job Description
Who we are
Element is the startup which employs the core team behind Matrix the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.
Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations and ultimately be in control of their own communication.
Practically speaking this means building open, self-sovereign alternatives to WhatsApp/Slack/Teams for governments, civic institutions and communities. At one end of the scale, the French government has adopted Matrix for all of its instant messaging needs and more recently we delivered the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service helping schools in Germany support remote learning. On the other end of the scale, open-source communities such as Mozilla have adopted Element for all of its community chat replacing IRC
The role
The Matrix community is made up of thousands of individuals contributing to hundreds of projects. It is well represented on popular forums such as hacker news and commands keynote speaking slots at prominent open source conferences such as FOSDEM.
The Element Advocacy function will cover the following areas. The initial hire into the team will not be expected to cover each area comprehensively though they will likely specialise in one.
- Interfacing with the Community
- Assisting the community with technical queries about the protocol
- Helping triage and respond to issues raised by the community
- Taking ownership for weekly touchpoints such as Matrix Live and This Week in Matrix, as well as our monthly event Open Tech Will Save Us.
- Technical Advocacy
- Presenting, demonstrating, and showcasing the protocol to a technical audience.
- Representing the technical side of the project at conferences, hackathons, meetups.
- Building examples (demo features/apps/bots/services) to promote the protocol to particular audiences or for particular usages.
- Technical reference materials
- Writing tutorials and blog posts to promote the protocol to a wider audience.
- Helping build, refine and expand Matrix’s technical documentation portal
- Contributing to the maintenance of the Matrix Specification itself
Reporting to the Head of Engineering Management you will take the lead on advocacy for the Matrix project acting as a crucial touchpoint between the core team and broader Matrix ecosystem.
Requirements
The most important thing is that you believe passionately in the mission of decentralisation of the internet. More specifically that you believe that communications should not be centralised in the hands of a small number of very large organisations and instead individuals should control their own data and choose who they share it with.
- Have at least 5 years experience in developer advocacy/evangelism
- Possess excellent interpersonal and communication skills, both spoken and written.
- Enjoy presenting and enthusing an audience
- Have the technical knowledge to understand and help refine the Matrix Specification
- Be adaptable in a rapidly evolving environment
- Want to fundamentally change and improve how people communicate on the internet.
- It is highly desirable that you have some previous history working in an open-source environment, either professionally or as a community member.
- The software development skills (Web, iOS or Android) required to build demos and help showcase the protocol
If you have any questions before making an application reach out to Mischa (@mischawalmsley:matrix.org) via https://app.element.io
Benefits
Our general approach is to treat people like adults and acknowledge that by being flexible we create an environment for people to do their best work. For more details here is our manifesto.
That said specific points that differentiate us.
- Work (almost) full time on FOSS projects with high visibility and a large enthusiastic community
- The chance to work with large scale governmental installations through to high profile FOSS projects such as Mozilla or KDE.
- Option to work partially or fully remote (our head office is in London), we offer flexibility and consider ourselves to be a family friendly environment.
- People tend to stay with the company for a long time, we take this as a sign that we have a cohesive supportive culture, that we have engaging challenging work and that people can develop their skills and careers here for the long term.
Element does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation,